


Fire and Ice Don't Mix

by The_Ace_Anon



Series: self-indulgent ahit/apop au [1]
Category: A Hat in Time (Video Game)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Blood and Gore, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Near Death, Physical Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:41:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27620821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Ace_Anon/pseuds/The_Ace_Anon
Summary: The Prince has been trapped in chains for a long, long time. But maybe today is the day he'll finally get out.(More of the self-indulgent crossover between my friends ocs and my comfort character. Derek, Debrah, and Logan all belong to @Darkwarfy on tumblr)
Relationships: The Florist & The Prince (A Hat in Time), The Prince/Queen Vanessa (A Hat in Time), the florist & ocs, the prince & ocs
Series: self-indulgent ahit/apop au [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2019415
Kudos: 5





	Fire and Ice Don't Mix

Thea’s cold. The frozen chains holding him to the wall are cutting into his skin, the fabric of the gag is dull and tasteless in his mouth, and he’s cold. He’s finally stopped shivering from the frost and ice stuck on his skin, distantly he’s aware that’s not good, that he should probably be concerned, but he’s too tired to care. He’s so tired. He can’t remember the last time he slept, his time in chains nothing but a dull blur. The fire in his chest died long ago, crushed by the ice, the shadows haven’t moved in what’s felt like weeks, too drained from failed attempts to break his icy confines. The only thing left in him is hope, and even that’s starting to die. He’s so tired, and he’s beginning to lose reasons to stay awake.

_ Maybe someone will find me. _ No one’s coming, no one’s come in weeks or months, only Vanessa, maybe no one else cares.

_ Vanessa will be sad if I’m gone. _ I’m too tired to give a fuck about how Vanessa will feel.

_ She says she loves me.  _ Is this really love? Is love supposed to hurt this much? If this is love, I don’t want to be loved.

_ Maybe soon she’ll let me down and we can go back to being happy again, maybe soon everything will go back to normal.  _ Can I really go back to normal after this? Can I really look at her without seeing chains and ice and pain? Will she ever even let me down in the first place?

_ Isn’t it better to live and hope? _ Isn’t it better to die and no longer suffer?

They echo in his head, a never-ending conversation with himself. The thoughts exhaust him, everything exhausts him……...he’s so tired. The cold has permanently settled beneath his skin, inside his bones, he finds it hard to believe he’ll ever be warm again. The door to the hidden room opens and he tenses up, already knowing who’s there, the only one who’s been there since he’s been locked in this spirit-forsaken room.

“....Thea?” A voice croaks and- that’s odd, that doesn’t sound like Vanessa. Thea tiredly raises his head to look at the door and his eyes widen in shock. There, standing in the door, is Debrah.

“Deb??” He says, or tries to say, but through the gag it comes out as nothing more than muffled nonsense. She looks horrified, eyes wide and hand over her mouth, but at his poor attempt to speak she snaps back into action. 

She quickly reaches up and manages to tear the gag out of his mouth. “Are you ok? Are you hurt at all?”

“I’m-I’m fine. Why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be in Helsoner?”

“We came here to look for you, Vanessa’s excuses for why you were missing were horrible, we knew something had to be wrong.” Deb explained as she pulled at his chains, struggling to break them. She was strong, but there were so many chains, all of them covered in ice and painful to hold. Thea tried to help her by pulling on them, but neither of them could pull out even a single one.

“I’ll-I’m gonna try and find something to help me break these, I’ll be right back.” She promised before running from the room. Thea pulled at the chains in her absence, trying to at least weaken them. Debrah wasn’t gone for very long, returning not with a tool but with Derek. The Borna prince looked startled to see him there, wrapped up with chains and covered in bruises. After a moment of shock he narrowed his eyes, studying the chains. 

Derek rolled up his sleeves. “Get ready to catch him if he falls.” He grabbed one of the ice coated chains, adjusted his feet, and pulled as hard as he could. After a minute or two of straining and pulling, the chain broke out of the wall with a loud  **_snap_ ** . He quickly got to work on the others, slowly but surely making his way through them until, finally, Thea fell off the wall and right onto Debrah. She caught him with a grunt and the prince felt his body go lax, relieved to finally be free from the wall. It was a little odd, no longer having the weight of the chains bearing down on him, but nice. He tried to stand, using Deb for support, but his legs refused to hold his weight. Anytime he managed to get up they’d buckle and give and he’d come crashing back down. After a few failed attempts Derek picked him up and let the prince lean on him for support.

“Th-” Thea coughed, unused to speaking without the gag. “Thank you.” He croaked.

“Don’t mention it.” Derek replied, already leading him out of the cellar. “We should get you to the medical wing-”

“N-no-no I need to talk to Vanessa.”

“But-”

“Vanessa is dangerous right now.” He said, looking Derek straight in the eyes. “I need to talk to her and tell others what she’s done so she doesn’t hurt anyone else. Do you know where she is right now?”

“....She’s in a meeting, Logan’s there watching her.”

“Perfect.”

It didn’t take long for them to get to the room. Deb threw open the doors, and everyone in the room stared as the princes entered. Logan stood at the sight of them, and all the guards snapped to attention at the sight of their prince. 

“We found Prince Thea.” Derek announced, glaring at Vanessa.

The queen glared right back at him, if looks could kill… “Who told you you could leave?”

Thea ignored her. “Queen Vanessa lied, I didn’t go abroad for school, I never even left the castle. She chained me up and kept me in the cellars, I’ve been there this entire time. Guards, would you mind arresting the queen for kidnapping and lying about the whereabouts of a royal?” 

Everyone turned to stare at Vanessa, who quickly stood and backed away from the guards. “Arrest me?! I’m your queen! You can’t-”

“My queen.” One of the guards said, cautiously approaching her. “Please come quietly-”

“Are you actually listening to him?!”

“Vanessa-” Thea started.

Vanessa whipped around to face him. “You! After all I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me? By having me arrested for trying to keep you safe?!” Ice was beginning to form around her feet, frost slowly covering the floor. The guard pulled out a pair of magic-restraining cuffs.

“Your majesty please-”

“I LOVE YOU THEA!” Vanessa screamed, her ice spiking and sharpening with her anger. “BUT IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU, NO ONE ELSE CAN!” The guard tackled the queen struggling to put the cuffs on her and- and- and there was a sharp pain in his chest.

Everything seemed to freeze. Thea blinked, confused as to why everything felt so off. The pain in his chest worsened and he looked down to see- oh-  _ oh _ \- there was ice sticking out of his chest, blood dripping down and sticking to it’s glassy surface and bits of his flesh stuck to it. Someone started screaming. Thea’s body went limp, too tired to hold himself up any longer. The exhaustion from earlier seemed to return with a vengeance, except this time it was dragging him down without his consent. Dimly, he was aware of someone touching him and frantic speaking, but he was too tired to make any of it out. The darkness closed in, the sudden exhaustion dragging him down further, and the world fell away to blackness.

\------

“Where’s Thea?!” Camilla burst into the waiting area of the medical wing, startling both Debrah and Derek. She had been working in her shop when one of the guards informed her that the prince had been found. She’d come to the castle as quickly as she could. “Why are we in the medical wing? Is he hurt?!”

“Cam-” Deb started, hands out as if trying to calm her down. But Cam wasn’t looking at her, she was staring wide-eyed at Derek, Derek who was covered with blood.

“WHAT HAPPENED?!” She cried, whipping around to face Deb.

“Vanessa- The Queen had been keeping Thea locked up in the cellar this entire time, we found him and when we brought him to her so she could be arrested she- she  _ impaled him _ . She had ice form behind him and speared it through his chest. We brought him here and quickly as we could, they’re working on healing him right now.”

“I- She- He’s-” Cam stammered, struggling to process the information. She felt like she was going to be sick, she couldn’t stop shaking. “I- need to sit down.” Her thoughts were a scattered mess of emotions. She wanted to punch Vanessa for hurting her friend, for almost killing one of the sweetest people she knew, she wanted to scream, to demand why no one found him sooner, but more than anything, she just wanted Thea to be ok. He didn’t deserve this, he didn’t deserve to have an abusive mess of a fiance, or to be locked up and chained in a cellar, or almost be killed by someone who claimed to ‘love’ him. 

“Have they told you anything about his condition?” She asked, looking back up at Deb.

She shook her head. “No, nothing yet.” Cam nodded and looked back down. The three of them waited there for hours, Deb quietly pacing, Derek staring at his blood-covered hands, and Cam with her head in her hands, struggling to get her thoughts together. Finally, after waiting for what felt like an entirety, the doors opened and one of the doctors came out. All three of them stared at her, Derek quickly standing when she entered, waiting for information.

“We’ve- we’ve managed to stabilize Prince Thea’s condition. It’ll be awhile before he wakes up, but he’ll live.” Cam let out the biggest sigh of relief in her life, tenison she didn’t even know she had slipping off her shoulders. 

“Can we see him?” The doctor nodded, and she led the three of them to Thea’s bed. Logan was sitting on the bed next to him, hunched over and looking absolutely exhausted. Deb quickly sat next to him, patting him on the back and asking if he was ok, while Derek stood by awkwardly, looking like he wanted to help comfort Logan but also didn’t want to get blood on him. Cam turned her attention to Thea. Her friend looked horrible, his skin was littered with bruises, scars (some old and some more recent), and the imprints of chains, he was a sickly shade of pale and his wrists and chest were completely wrapped up with bandages. 

“He’ll be fine.” Logan told her from his spot on the bed. “Or at least he better be, I put too much work into healing him just for him to up and die.” 

“You should go get some rest, you look horrible.” Cam replied.

Logan stood and stretched. “Wow, thanks.”

“She’s right, you look really tired. We’ll watch over him, you should get some sleep.” Deb said, watching him with concerned eyes.

Logan sighed. “Fine.” He glanced over at Derek. “You wanna come with me, love? You look like you could use a bath.”

“I-” Derek looked down at his hands. “....Yeah, a bath would probably be a good idea.” The two of them left the room, Cam sat down next to Debrah, still staring at Thea.

Deb looked between the two of them, before breaking the tense quiet. “You doing alright?”

“.....No, no I’m really not. I knew Vanessa was treating him horribly. I just never thought- I didn’t think she would go so far, I don’t think any of us did.” She sighed and put her head in her hands. “........I feel like this is my fault.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know just- He never listened to me when I tried to tell him about Vanessa, but maybe if I’d just been a little more insistent, maybe this whole thing could’ve been avoided. I knew she was treating him like trash, I knew she was hurting him, but I still let him go back to her, I never tried to stop him.”

“Maybe it could’ve been, but you also might’ve lost your friend. I get it, it’s not easy being friends with someone in a bad situation, it’s hard watching them go back to someone you know is hurting them. But you can’t dwell on all those ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’, you can’t go back and change things. What happened wasn’t good, or right, or fair, but it happened, and now we just have to deal with it. He’s going to live, he’s going to be ok. It might take him a while to get better, it might take years, but he’s going to be ok. Don’t think about what you could’ve done, think about what you can do to improve things.”

Cam didn’t respond, too emotionally drained to continue the talk. The room fell into another, less tense, silence. Both of them just watching Thea sleep, hoping he wakes up soon. At some point, Logan came back, switching out with Deb so she could get some rest. The prince tried to suggest that she get some rest too, but the florist refused. She wasn’t leaving until Thea was awake.

A few days passed. From time to time Debrah and Derek would bring her some food and suggest that maybe she should leave to get some rest, the food taken with gratitude and the suggestions for rest ignored. Every now and then Logan would come by and heal him some more. Any sleep she got was from passing out next to his bed. With each day Thea looked a little better, his skin gained more color, the chain imprints faded a bit more, he looked more  _ alive _ . She was on the verge of falling asleep again when she heard it.

“....C...am?” Camilla’s eyes shot open. Thea’s eyes were open, tired but bright and  _ alive _ , and he was looking at her and he was  _ talking _ \- Large tears started to drip down from her eyes, and Thea’s expression quickly changed from tired to worried. “Are- are you-” He was cut off as Cam hugged him, holding him tightly while still being careful not to hurt him. The stress of the last few days finally came rushing out. Thea hugged her back, letting her cry.

“Hey, it’s ok. I’m fine, everything’s ok.” He muttered, trying to reassure her.

“No it’s not!” Cam cried. “You almost died Thea! That’s not ok!”

Thea went quiet at that. “You’re right…...it’s not. But at least I’m alive.”

“At least! If you ever die I’m gonna track down your ghost and punch you.”

He gave a weak laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You better.” She hugged him tighter and the two of them just sat there, holding each other, Cam crying and Thea finally safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Derek, Deb, and Logan all belong to my friend Darkwary on tumblr.


End file.
